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Clive McFoy presses a touchscreen on what could be — to the untrained eye — an ATM machine you find in convenience stores.

And in a way it is. But this is a transaction of a different sort. The dialysis machine McFoy is maintaining is making a withdrawal of excess waste and water from patient Jocelyn Demgillo, while clean blood is deposited back into her.

In the dimly lit second-floor ward of the dialysis unit at North York’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, McFoy is ensuring the machine will be ready for another patient on another day.

He presses a series of buttons, and the machine emits a burbling noise as it goes through a heat-generated cleaning cycle.

“We have to make sure everything is pristine,” says McFoy, as he proceeds to disinfect and wipe down the unit, just one of more than a dozen he will attend to this night.

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McFoy is surrounded by about a dozen patients in one of several rooms being used on this floor to house people who, like Demgillo, have had acute kidney failure.

“I was having memory trouble, and I lost maybe 20 pounds. I was so scared. I thought I had cancer at first,” says the 54-year-old former bank worker.

More than a year ago she got the diagnosis. Now she spends three days a week, four hours a day, in the ward that has become her lifeline. Like the others on the ward, she is glued to a TV screen to help pass the time. Tonight she is watching the reality show Survivor. It reminds her of home because this season the cast is being filmed in the Philippines, where she was born.

“It makes you feel a little insecure,” says Demgillo. “You see your friends going on with their lives and you don’t know about your own.”

Demgillo is on a waiting list for a transplant. But she is told it could take anywhere from five to seven years.

She is one of the “regulars” McFoy sees during his 10-hour shift at the hospital.

“It makes you feel incredibly fortunate when you see what some people go through,” says McFoy, who is already working on another machine.

McFoy, 55, is no stranger to hard work. When he finishes his shift at Sunnybrook, where he works full-time hours, he goes to his second job at Toronto General, moonlighting in the dialysis ward there.

The father of two boys, ages 13 and 15 years old, works six days a week.

It seems McFoy has almost always had more than one job. After graduating from college with a marketing degree, he worked at the now defunct Simpson’s department store in retail, then in the fur storage division at upscale retailer Holt Renfrew.

He started working as a technician in 1998 after taking a training course at Toronto General.

McFoy’s work ethic prompted one friend to jokingly describe him as a member of the Hedleys, the television family portrayed in the 1990s sketch “Hey Mon” comedy series In Living Color, in which Damon Wayans played the head of the hardest working West Indian family in existence.

Some days McFoy will go with as little as four hours of sleep before his next shift. Still, he looks a decade younger than his years.

“I really have nothing to complain about. Hard work is a part of who I am and it’s been a source of strength and a source of pride.”

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